Chromebook Experiment Report!
So, a lot of you have been waiting patiently for me to report on how my experiment is going with my new Google Chromebook. Well, I can report great success! I find my new Google Chromebook, which by the way, is an Acer C720P, to be very light, small, easy to use, and very, very fast!
In terms of actual use, since a lot of what I do is already in the Cloud, it’s really no different than using my Chrome browser on a regular computer. And, that makes sense. Since I use my Chrome browser exclusively, with a few minor exceptions, such as, I use Mozilla Firefox to view certain RSS feeds because I like the way it displays the feeds, and Google Chrome does not display those feeds, except as raw XML. Now, yes, there are tools available as Chrome plug-ins that will allow me to view those feeds. In fact, I use one called “Slick RSS.” It works really well and I like it. But, sometimes I just want to see an RSS feed displayed like Mozilla Firefox displays it, so there you go…
What I was most concerned about when using a Chromebook was my ability to be able to connect to other computers, which I need to manage. I have two options to do this, which I use for different situations. One is the Google Chrome Remote Desktop, which can be set up very easily on computers that you own, such as your home PC, and it allows you to connect to, and display the console of that PC. The other option that I have is the use of VMware View, which I use to connect to a View session at work to do computer management at the hospital that I work at. VMware has an HTML5 View Client that works well under Chrome.
Now, you might say that it’s cheating for me to use a Chromebook to connect to a full-blown Windows computer to do certain things that I need to do at work! Maybe. But that’s the nature of the technology at this point. I have to work with what I have to work with. So, you may say that I’m not really using my Chromebook to do everything I need to do, but within the parameters of my experiment, I think I’m doing pretty well.
The question was, “can I use the Chromebook for the majority of my computing and get the job done?” To me, the answer is “yes.” You may quibble with my belief that I can do all my computing via my Chromebook. That’s entirely up to you. But for me, I find that I can function quite nicely using the Chromebook as a primary computer. Notice I said a primary computer, not the primary computer. That’s a fine distinction, but one I feel I have to make. A lot of what I do requires a lot of computing power. One thing that I do every week is my own video netcast. This requires editing my video and then rendering it into different formats. Now, there are video editors available that work well with chrome. One is WeVideo. It’s okay. I’m not that enthusiastic about it. Maybe it’s because I’m really used to the editor that I use every week. That is, the AVS Video Editor. It simply rocks!
But again, other than that, most of what I do, I can do with a Chromebook. At least, that’s my findings so far.